ABSTRACT
Butts’s preoccupation with freedom extends into her formal techniques in the syntactical freedom she allows herself in the novel. In Death of Felicity Taverner, Scylla attempts to explain the behaviour of her aunt Julia, Felicity’s mother, by arguing that ‘the world passionately resents freedom in others – freedom of genius or beauty or madness or crime – it’s all one to our teeming sphere’ (189). Along with its autobiographical origins, this theme has a pecuniary facet which is touched on in a brief interjection of Borris’s idiom amidst an authorial gloss: ‘Free and free and free again for ever. A slave, to Boris, was a man who is aware of the existence of economic pressure’ (270). In spite of her enthusiasm for freedom in all its forms, Butts is not an author to portray her ideals as being without complication. Boris had learned, the narrator informs us, that there are people, including Kralin and himself, with ‘nothing to lose’:
a nothing which includes an indifference in their inner selves – they are free to make things happen; bizarre or violent things, stupid or intelligent things; secret or open – with often an odd preference for the secret. Sober theories or experiments, delirious irresponsibilities, grotesque, monstrous, idealistic or savagely realistic things – anything is possible to persons whose isolation and liberty have freed themselves from common inhibitions.
(315)